Paolo Cirio. Monitoring Control

FMAV Fondazione Modena Arti Visive presents, starting from November 19, 2021, Monitoring Control, an exhibition by Paolo Cirio curated by Marco Scotini, which will be held in the Palazzina dei Giardini exhibition center until January 31 2022. The opening of the exhibition will be Friday 19 November from 6 to 8 pm.

In addition to bringing together a large and cohesive selection of works produced by the artist over the last ten years in a single exhibition path, the exhibition opens with a large installation, entitled Iris, created for the occasion.

Among the most careful investigators, in the artistic field, of the effects of the information society, for about 20 years Paolo Cirio has developed a detailed investigation on the interrelation between infosphere and space of global capitalism, merged into what he himself, in more recent years , he called documentary realism. While Paul Virilio advocated the derealization of the world by means of new media, hadn't Hal Foster been announcing the return of the real since the 1990s? Through a series of important works (eight of which are present in the exhibition), Cirio has tried to give visual form to all those forces that control and capture our lives (in a pervasive and violent way), evading normal perception and remaining carefully hidden while operating at the light of the Sun. In this sense, realism means overcoming the constitutive opacity of the contemporary (economic, social, legal) world. Not only through the unmasking of what appears but also through a modeling of what remains buried.

For this reason, the title of the exhibition Monitoring Control alludes to a double monitoring: that exercised by power and, vice versa, that which social subjectivities can exercise over forms of control, through an awareness of the phenomenon and an antagonistic operation. Monitoring Control, from this point of view, is an exhibition sequence of sabotages to security and surveillance forms that opens and closes with the large tower located in the historic octagonal vestibule of the Palazzina dei Giardini. Directly alluding to the control tower of the Panopticon, the structure is central and in place of the guard post eight photographs of ocular and differently colored irises are mounted, to form a large octagonal crown.

Biographical notes: Paolo Cirio